


Victor

by penguistifical



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Horror, I'm done being soft I want power, M/M, stretching an unusual premise here with how Eye powers might work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:56:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25966984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penguistifical/pseuds/penguistifical
Summary: If there’s anything the Eye craves, it’s novelty. Though there are infinite secrets to discover and tease out, the truth is not always a satisfying prize once discovered. There are, after all, only so many ways that even the most creative hedonist might sin. There are, give or take, only fourteen ways a person might feel abject terror of the flavor that strengthens an Entity. How lucky it is that Elias serves the Entity that can also be nourished from watching the same fear that feeds any of the other thirteen.elias tries something with his powers that he hasn't attempted before
Relationships: Barnabas Bennett/Jonah Magnus, Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas
Comments: 6
Kudos: 50





	Victor

**Author's Note:**

> cw: drugging and violence (not graphic, but on page)  
> neither peter nor elias die, but there is a lot of talk about death
> 
> I know I usually write soft, but this one's more horror
> 
> here is some listening for everyone while they read:  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyknBTm_YyM (Camille Saint-Saëns - Danse Macabre)

“A shame,” Peter says blithely. “They were a handsome couple."  
  
Elias has just presented him with a dossier on a recent widow he’d absently been keeping an eye on. He expects the widower will be a potent sacrifice for the Lonely -for Beholding as well, after Peter returns to his side with delectable details.  
  
Peter takes the papers, thumbing through approvingly. Elias is entertained with how it all feels so similar to recommending a new restaurant, with both of them perusing a menu.

"Perhaps I should go pay her a visit and offer my condolences.” Peter says.  
  
Elias considers condolences from a Lukas to be as sandpaper on an open wound. They always express sympathies in a way that exponentially aggravates the loss.

“You find them to be an attractive pair?” Elias asks, knowing full well Peter had been being snide. “Perhaps I’ll keep your tastes in mind the next time the Institute needs a new Head.” He examines the newspaper article Peter’s holding, and sneers. “Then again, perhaps not.”

Peter rolls his eyes and tucks the bundle of papers into his coat pocket.  
  
“Vain old man.” Peter says, a ghost of fondness behind his words.  
  
“You’ve never seemed jealous,” Elias comments.  
  
“Of what, your ability to find new bodies? No, why should I be?” Peter shakes his head. “I don’t know what you and Simon get out of it. The years I’ll have are enough. I don’t care to bet on how long I’ll live, but I’ll spend my last moments in the Lonely and fade into the fog alone.” Peter sighs wistfully.

Elias moves away from Peter, annoyed. He’d been thinking about asking Peter to stay for the night, after he's finished with today's target.  
  
But now the mood's dashed.

“Are _you_ jealous?” Peter asks, sensing Elias's mood. “That I should be content with that? That I’m not trying to stay?”  
  
“Jealous of your mayfly life? Not at all,” Elias says dismissively. “Head out to your widow, and then to the Lonely to waste away to nothing if you like. Don’t let me keep you from it.”

“Elias, if I thought that you could keep me from my death, I wouldn’t spend any time around you. You’d never see me in person again." Peter states with finality. "But, all your scheming to contrive that particular ritual extends only to yourself. It’s not as if you can use your Knowing to put someone else in a new body."

Peter reaches out to Elias’s arm, tugging him back to his side. The beholder is long familiar with Peter’s habit of enjoying brief intimacies before going out hunting, as if seeking a pointed opposite to emphasize the isolation he's about to inflict.

Elias allows himself to be pulled close and embraced. He shivers involuntarily as Peter’s hot breath against his neck abruptly fades to cool fog, the sudden contrast sending a chill down his spine. And then, he stays standing in his office, considering.

The avatar of the Lonely has departed, but his words remain running circles in Elias’s mind.   
  
It’s true that the ceremony of moving over his eyes to a new body is strongly tied to the idea of what he’s Seen, and that he might See further if given more years to do so. His relationship with Beholding is rarely one of self-sacrifice, but his god continues to grant this favor. He supposes the Eye is pleased to retain a faithful servant. The transfer would otherwise fail. He’d die.

Elias doesn't know what other avatars might use in place of their eyes in an equivalent ritual for their own Entities. He’s not even sure what a servant of the Lonely _could_ use - theoretically, he promises Peter in his thoughts. Their powers are often about an absence of physicality, so body part seems like it would suffice.

And yet, he can’t stop thinking about the idea of rewriting a person, re-sculpting the soul. It's possible for him to put information, usually through select visuals, into another person's mind. If he puts a surfeit of knowledge into someone's psyche, flooding out what they've originally known, won't they cease to be who they were? If given enough new information, enough memories, wouldn't they then become someone else? Elias has never come across any records of such a feat being attempted.

If there’s anything the Eye craves, it’s novelty. Though there are infinite secrets to discover and tease out, the truth is not always a satisfying prize once discovered. There are, after all, only so many ways that even the most creative hedonist might sin. There are, give or take, only fourteen ways a person might feel abject terror of the flavor that strengthens an Entity. How lucky it is that Elias serves the Entity that can also be nourished from watching the same fear that feeds any of the other thirteen.

Elias can feel his god’s gaze, and considers it a blessing for him to begin this endeavor. He knows that, whether he fails or succeeds, his god will be pleased with his attempts, adoring watching that which is both unexplored and wholly horrifying.

* * *

His first experiment is exactly that: both an experiment, in that Elias has no idea what to expect, and the first of what would become many forays into raising the dead.  
  
It's neither a person he’d been slowly investigating nor any potential avatar. The poor soul is merely unlucky. Elias had actually been seeking archival assistants, and one applicant has neither useful talents nor people to question his disappearance. In short, a perfect candidate for Elias's experimentation. In a word: disposable.  
  
The beholder coaxes the man to his office with a promise of a private evening interview. Elias shakes his hand, invites them to have a seat, and then quietly removes and discards his gloves that he’d coated with a potent and concentrated sedative while the would-be archival assistant collapses at his desk.  
  
The most logical place to begin, to create a copy of a person’s mind, is obviously with the person he knows best: himself. Elias doesn’t believe he’ll succeed immediately, but, if he does, he’ll have a partner, an extension of himself with the exact same goals and god. Four mortal eyes are better than two.  
  
Ideally, the original owner of the body won’t be able to recall any of his own memories. He won’t be entirely gone, but reduced to a tiny kernel of self at the back of what used to be his own mind.  
  
Elias slowly starts the laborious process of placing Knowledge inside the other man’s mind. He realizes almost immediately after he begins that, ironically, Elias has Seen too much. He may not be an Archive himself, but he is a veritable collection of the stories of others. He’s still sorting out the memories from the fourth body he’d taken when the person he's slowly placing information into regains consciousness with a jolt.

The man lets out a wordless and warbled cry of terror, fully himself but buried in the myriad memories of Jonah Magnus.

Elias quickly rises to his feet and presses a glass into the man’s hand.

“You had an accident, do you remember? Drink this, it will help.”

It does help, in the sense that the man’s terror quickly fades. His death is swift and painless, Elias’s gift to him.  
  
Though Elias hadn’t really thought he’d get perfect results on his first try, there had been a whisper of hope that perhaps he would. That whisper in his mind murmurs ever louder with each passing attempt that perhaps this next try, no, the next after that, will be the success Jonah has been daring to dream of for a century.

Every following attempt results in similar failures.  
  
He doesn't try again to make a copy of himself. Instead, Elias carefully chooses people from his past. He places their stories into his vessels: their years, their dreams, their fears and hopes, every memory that he knows of woven together to make again in life the people that he'd intimately known.  
  
Each person he lures back to his office turns first from a promising upright and undrooling candidate into something to be discarded. 

Elias discretely moves the bodies down to Artefact Storage, closes the door, and then returns after several minutes to see that the meat has been gratefully accepted and vanished by...something.

His process becomes more ritualistic as he attempts to focus his mind, to structure the tower of being that he’s constructing memory by memory in the process of replacing one person’s mind with another's.  
  
He feels, with each passing attempt, the full weight of the Beholder’s stare, greedily drinking in all his useless efforts.  
  
Resurrection should be within his grasp, but nothing seems to work.

* * *

Elias sees Peter again after his twelfth attempt, and the avatar of the Lonely immediately senses his disquiet.

“You’re riled up about something,” Peter starts, carefully. “Immersed in your work?”

“Always, according to you.” 

“This is different.” Peter says, watching him pace slowly around the office.  
  
Elias had wanted Peter to visit him in success, had wanted to gloat and show off his masterpiece. Approaching him with more than a double handful of failures feels like weakness.

He confesses to Peter anyway, that he’s been trying to rewrite the stories of the dead on templates of the living rendered blank.

Fog flickers back and forth around Peter like a candle guttering out, but the man forces himself to stay and listen, clearly utterly appalled.

“As the Eye is my witness, I’d never do such a thing with you or your memories,” Elias finishes. “I know it’s everything you’d never want.” Elias smiles wryly. “Though I’ll never understand why.”

Peter nods and relaxes for the first time since Elias started speaking. Elias doesn’t tell him that he’s sitting where most of the victims have sat as well, saying instead, “I don’t suppose you have any suggestions for what I might try next?” Stopping isn't currently an option, not while the Eye and Elias both are so invested.  
  
Peter frowns in consideration. “Have you thought about blood ties? Seeking out any distant relatives from someone you're trying to, ah, bring back?"  
  
“Blood's never mattered for me.” Elias shrugs, and resumes pacing the room. He’d actually like to crawl into Peter’s lap, but is certain he’d be rebuked.  
  
“Well, you’re trying something new, aren’t you? It’s always been important for my...for some servants of the Lonely.”

“Important for your family, you mean?” Elias scoffs. “Are you sure that isn’t just a coincidence of numbers? For every Lukas that turns to solitude it seems there’s another that jumped ship for a happy life surrounded by laughter.”

Peter grimaces, but it’s a truth. For that matter, there are also several Lukases that find a quiet comfort in being alone. It's not a revulsion for the presence of others, but for the fondness of their own company. The pleasure from the peace of being alone is as much an enemy to the Lonely as is enjoying the company of friends.

“You’re not wrong,” Peter says slowly, surprising Elias. “But, it’s exactly that sort of person that I had in mind to offer you.”

* * *

The next evening sees a strange new Lukas in Elias’s office, a man he hasn't met before. The fellow arrives unconscious on Peter’s shoulder, couriered by cloying mist.  
  
Peter doesn’t stay, and Elias doesn’t ask him to return.  
  
Elias doesn’t know in what way this Lukas is related to Peter. There’s certainly not much of a resemblance between them - especially in the laugh lines that mark this stranger’s face.

Elias takes a moment to make sure that his new canvas is propped up comfortably at the desk, his head tilted back for easy breathing, his arms arranged as if he’s simply a napping visitor. The beholder feels as though he’s moving around a large vacant doll, and is pleased by the thought.

He returns to his own chair and turns his gaze inwards. He begins to slowly recount the life of a man he knew very well.  
  
He guesses nothing, everything he speaks and envisions is a truth, an experience, the summation of what was learned and seen in a life lived. He places these images and this knowledge into the Lukas sitting across from him, easily rewriting the pages of his mind. Occasionally Knowing, occasionally showing, Elias continues to murmur through the years.

Every time he finishes a decade, the Lukas across from him twitches, an uncoordinated jerking of limbs as if moved by a conflicted puppeteer. Elias considers this promising.

He’d decided before beginning that he probably shouldn’t speak of a funeral, in case it should be a confusing memory to the dead. And so, he finishes instead with the last time he saw the man whose life he now narrates.

Jonah had been beside himself with rage, embracing a canvas shroud to his chest and losing the skin on his wrists from how tightly he’d been clutching the rough fabric that held the remains of Barnabas Bennett.   
  
Jonah had been expecting to retrieve a body, a recognizable form that he might at least kiss goodbye. Instead, he'd found nothing but bones, picked clean and polished soft by fog, spit out by the Lonely like the careless afterthought of a vulture’s meal. It would be the last time in Jonah’s life, in any body, that he’d be blinded by tears.  
  
Mordecai had been an impassive wall, regarding him with only polite interest, while Jonah had been furious, frenzied, grief-stricken.

Complicit.  
  
Barnabas had been Jonah’s sacrifice to the Eye just as much as he’d been Morcedai’s to the Lonely. It hadn’t been enough, offering up circumstantial and incidental terror to the Eye. Something more had been needed, something personal. Jonah had consciously chosen, with every day, with every plea, to remain watching, balancing Barnabas’s despair against the heady pleasure of being filled with the power of Beholding.  
  
Either man could have stopped Barnabas’s demise, but now, Jonah may have a chance to undo his death.

And yet, as he approaches the end of the memory, Elias can see that once again he’s about to fail. The Lukas across from him is beginning to undergo the telltale spasms of a personality fighting to surface and breathe under an undertow of a life not their own.

Elias struggles to get his own emotions in check, only realizing that his description has become harsh begging when he hears himself voice, “Don’t leave me alone again." He grits his teeth to keep from speaking further, staring down at his desk, hating his own hypocrisy.  
  
When he looks up, he’s startled to realize that the man across from him is, for just the briefest of moments, harder to see through a veil of fog. Elias blinks and the mist vanishes so that he has a clear view of the body slumped across from him.

A body that suddenly sits up.  
  
He's moving with a control Elias hasn’t yet seen from one of experiments. Elias watches, rapt, as the man immediately puts a hand to his face, hissing at the light, protecting his eyes.  
  
Elias quickly dims the lamp, and watches the man slowly lower his arm. The beholder is certain that the man’s eyes had been dark brown when he was delivered to the office. But now, they’ve become a muted green that Jonah recognizes, even after so many years.

“Hello, Mordecai.” Jonah says fondly.  
  
Mordecai Lukas’s face twists in disgust, and he jumps to his feet. He brings his arm downwards in a sharp scything command of a gesture that Jonah hasn’t seen in centuries. Where Mordecai's hand moves, the air parts and fills with fog. He steps sideways into the line of the Lonely and vanishes wordlessly, leaving Jonah to gloat and brood in a dim office, alone. 

He doesn’t expect that Mordecai will return. Nor, probably, will Peter, at least for some time.  
  
The clock ticks by for a full hour before Elias finally stands and moves to the back of his office to open a very precious cabinet. He cradles the skull that he retrieves in both hands, caressing the ridges of the eye sockets with his thumbs.

“A few more successes, and then, perhaps, we’ll try with your memories, hm?” Jonah asks.  
  
Barnabas’s skull seems to grin back at him in response. 

But, then again, being a skull: it can do little else.

**Author's Note:**

> spooky, maybe? could have saved this until halloween but I have other october plans
> 
> spent some time here thinking about whether or not elias was actually going to become a poisoner and in the end I decided yes, because there was enough already going on with Eye abilities that was a stretch 
> 
> in my mind, the idea of resurrecting somebody this way with Eye abilities is doomed to fail - a lukas came back through Lonely+Eye abilities, but elias wouldn't be able to get barnabas. 
> 
> thank you everybody who leaves kudos and comments, you are all really great and I appreciate it a lot


End file.
